Moving Targets

by William J. Reynolds

  I looked over but Kennerly refused to meet my eyes, being more interested in some invisible spot on the carpeting.

  “I see,” I said slowly. “Time to call in the big guns.”

  “Enough time’s gone by. We gave it a shot and it didn’t work.” At last he looked up. “It’s nobody’s fault.”

  It was my turn to look away, toward the drapes hiding the glass doors. “What does Banner think?”

  “I haven’t discussed it with her, or anyone. I wanted to tell you first; it’s only fair. Anyhow, she’s not going to object, I can guarantee you that. Remember, she thought we were a couple of idiots from the very beginning, wasting our time. In fact, as I recall, you did, too.”

  He was smiling. I imitated it. “Yeah, it’s ironic: Yesterday morning I was full of reasons for your not putting me on the case; now I’m trying to think of one good reason you should let me continue with it.” And not coming up with one, I could have added; there was no denying the fact that I had hardly set the world on fire this time.

  “Well, that’s it, then.” He set his half-finished drink on the counter near him. “In the morning—at a more reasonable hour in the morning, I should say—I’ll call Emily and tell her what we think. I’m sure she’ll go along with it, but I have to run it by her first, of course. Then I’ll call Banner and have her—”

  “No, I’ll do all that.”

  “Look, there’s no need—”

  “Yes, there is a need. I had this image in mind of my rolling up to the place with Kate beside me, returning her to the bosom of her loving family, accepting their accolades and eternal gratitude. The whole nine yards. Well, my bid for a hero’s welcome has netted exactly zip. Worse, for all I know, it may have done more harm than good. I’m the one who botched it, I’m the one who should explain it. I planned to head on over there in a few hours anyhow; while I’m there I’ll tell them what you think we should do next. Don’t worry, I’ll sell the idea.”

  “I’m not worried about that; I just wish there was something I could say to convince you that you haven’t ‘botched’ anything. It just didn’t work out as we’d hoped.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” I peeled myself off of the furniture. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to toss you out on your ear. I want to grab a couple of hours’ shut-eye …” He went without protest. As he slipped into his cold-weather gear we talked about my getting my report to him, him getting my check to me, when we’d get together for lunch—bullshit like that. Finally I shut the door after him, set the deadbolt, and kicked the towel up against the bottom of the door.

  I doused the lights and stretched out on the couch, but I didn’t sleep. My brain was whirling like a Waring Blendor, getting nowhere fast. I was wrong when I told Kirby that he was the only one besides Jennings who met the three qualifications for the job of Chief Suspect, namely, knowing Jack Castelar, knowing Kate Castelar, and knowing Christina Jennings. I must have been. Eliminate Kirby as well as Jennings, and you’re left with … whom?

  Two possibilities: Someone known to us, one of the cast of characters running through this little drama, or someone unknown to us, a total cipher who had managed to keep himself or herself completely out of the picture thus far.

  It had to be the former. For one thing, it was hard to imagine that someone with no discernible motive simply got the bug to knock off a pair of unrelated people and kidnap a girl while he was at it. For another, the conventions of the detective genre demand it. The desperate killer can’t be some schlep who’s unheard of until the last page. Not even Agatha Christie pulls such large rabbits out of her hats.

  All right, then, who’d we have? Well, to entertain the remote possibility that she removed herself from the proceedings, Kate; then Emily, Amy, Vince, and Uncle Charlie.

  Uncle Charlie. There he was again.

  Jennings had told me he thought Christina had been seeing someone on the side—not hard to believe, based on the way she had been gussied up last night when I stopped by. I had tried to put Frank Kirby into that space in the puzzle, since Jennings had also mentioned that Kirby had had a female friend. But Kirby, apparently, did not fit. So what if we tried Charles Castelar in that slot?

  Obviously Charlie would know both Jack and Kate; he could have known Christina. It shouldn’t be hard to check. Castelar was a bachelor; maybe he was looking for company one night and wound up with Christina. Or maybe he purposely sought her out, knowing she could help set up Jennings for what he had in mind. Either way, it shouldn’t have been hard: The Fat Lady had given me to understand that anything in pants had at least an even chance of sampling Christina’s wares.

  He could pretend to be smitten by her red hair and shapely legs. Gams. Then, when Jennings was well and truly framed, exit Christina. Compared to fratricide, bimbocide’s nothing.

  Nuts, this was pointless. Sure, Charlie Castelar could have had a reason to want Jack Castelar dead; sure, he could have known Christina; sure, he could have bumped her off. But did he? Any number of people might have wanted Jack Castelar dead—dissatisfied customers, business rivals, even Emily or Vince or Amy or, yes, Uncle Charlie. Once you started digging, who could say what kinds of motives you’d turn up? But they all left you with the question of Kate: Why had she disappeared? If she knew who the killer was, why hadn’t she been killed herself? If she had been killed, why had her murder been concealed while the others had not been?

  No, something was still missing.

  And finding it was no longer my responsibility.

  I got up and carried my glass back into the kitchen, where I built another drink, this time splashing the liquor over the ice cubes and cutting it about fifty percent with flat generic lemon-lime that had been in the door of the fridge I didn’t know how long. I stood leaning against the counter for a good long time, basking in the bluish rays of the fluorescent doughnut, thinking, thinking. And getting nowhere.

  Eventually I turned off the light and wandered down the short hall to the bedroom. I turned the couch into a bed, but I didn’t undress. I lounged on it for a while, leafing through magazines, finding nothing I cared to read. I picked up a Pronzini novel I’d begun before Jen dropped in and turned my routine inside-out. The book caused me to reflect on how detective writers are inordinately fond of anonymous narrators, perhaps because Hammett never named his operative for the Continental Detective Agency, but how the device really doesn’t work over the long haul. Once you start capitalizing Continental Op or Nameless Detective, they stop being nameless.

  Well, that was good for about eight minutes. I tossed the paperback aside and got up, wandered over to the desk, sat down, turned on the cheap lamp, and picked up some of the clutter. My notes on The Next Book. I didn’t think much more of them now than I had earlier that evening. Yesterday evening, I reminded myself. I skimmed through them. There was a spelling error on the third sheet; I corrected it in blue felt-tip. I started to clean up some prose that was alarmingly awkward, even for rough notes, and soon saw that the single-spaced page was ruined. I took a new legal pad from a side drawer and began to write on it, first merely recopying the revised page, then, without even realizing it at first, taking off afresh from that point. Half a dozen pages later I saw what was happening.

  The story line was going in a completely new direction from the one I’d previously sketched. It started from the same point and was heading for the same destination, but it was taking a new route to get there. This was not unusual. Back when I was just a pup, I thought there was but one way to tell a given story, long or short, fiction or nonfiction. You sat down and wrote the piece. But the more I wrote, the more acquainted I became with my craft, the more I came to understand that there is a virtually infinite number of ways to construct a story: different points of view, alternative approaches; various styles and tones, shadings and pacings—sometimes several within a single story. This knowledge is both good and bad. Good because it gives you range, breadth as well as depth, a choice of colors for your word-pictures; bad becau
se you become uncomfortable with simply pounding it out like you did in the old days, you sacrifice speed for—you hope—the sake of surer, clearer prose.

  After an hour or so I quit, reluctantly. I wasn’t fooling myself: My writer’s block, if there is such a thing, didn’t disintegrate before the irresistible force of my astonishing self-discipline. It was largely my sense of frustration, defeat, impotence about the case I had been politely booted off of that propelled me back into The Next Book. There, on paper, I could indulge myself in the illusion that I have control, that events respond to me, not the other way around.

  It’s a pleasant-enough dream. But now it was time for an inoculation of reality, hard reality.

  I set aside the pad, stood, stretched, and went to look out the small windows set high in the bedroom wall. Still dark. I consulted my watch: not quite six. Two hours until daylight, give or take a few minutes. There are times when I wish daylight would take the day off, when the night is calming, comforting, insulating. This was one of those times. But, as usual, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  I shut off the desk lamp, stripped, showered, made coffee, dressed—all the usual up-and-at-’em stuff. At about seven I forced myself to go down to the car and get it headed in the direction of the Castelars’. Traffic was fairly heavy, thanks to the eight-to-five set. The DJ on WOW was painting a meteorological scene very much like yesterday’s, but with the added treat of blizzardlike conditions in the afternoon or evening. Headlights flickered and flared against my damaged windshield, occasionally illuminating the webworks of cracks, charging them with light, making them look like jagged lightning bolts across a darkened summer sky.

  The winter sky, meanwhile, had lightened almost imperceptibly. The day was on its way, like it or not.

  I didn’t.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dawn must have been reading the paper before she came on duty: Her famous rosy fingers were tattletale gray when she showed up along about eight, almost simultaneous with my arrival at the big old farmhouse.

  I pulled around back, got out of the car, and stood in the clean cold air, enjoying the silence of the flat, snow-blanketed landscape. An indifferent snow fell, had been falling intermittently for the last half-hour or so. That and the occasional breath of wind, toppling softened ice and snow from trees and buildings, were the only signs of movement. However, tire tracks up and down the driveway, and footprints and pawprints out back of the house, said there already had been some activity this a.m.

  I’m not much of a wide-open-spaces type, but it was beautiful out here, no question about it, even on a gloomy, sunless day like today, even with the news I was bearing.

  I headed up the cement stairs to the back porch. I had a key to the kitchen door, having lined it up yesterday morning in anticipation of coming in late last night, but I knocked a few times and waited several minutes before I used it.

  The old spaniel greeted me, and I had to stop and stoop and pat him down sufficiently before he’d let me into the room and out of my winter wear. “Anybody home?” I called, even though somebody obviously was: I heard water running upstairs and saw that the coffee maker’s orange light was illuminated. I wandered through the high-ceilinged kitchen and into the dining room just as Vince Castelar bounded down the stairs.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said, coming into the room. “I thought Mom had forgotten something.”

  “Up and off already? Where to, at this early hour?”

  He continued through the dining room and into the kitchen. I followed, watched him take down a coffee cup, shook my head when he offered me one. “Charlie came by a little while ago to take her to the airport. Some of my dad’s cousins from down south are getting in, I don’t know, around nine, I think.” He poured a cup and looked at me. “The funeral’s tomorrow, you know.”

  I didn’t know. I hadn’t even thought about it, though I had been aware that burial had been delayed by the cops, by Kate’s absence, by the weather. Evidently the M.E. felt he had learned all he was going to learn from the decedent; the relatives were winging in while there was a brief break in the weather; and Kate … Well, Kate was going to miss it.

  Vince filled his cup and, leaning against the center island, faced me. “I thought you were going to stay here again last night,” he said, a dash of recrimination seasoning his words. “I didn’t stay up, because I have to go back to my classes this morning, but I didn’t hear you come in—and, no offense, you don’t look like you got much sleep.”

  “I didn’t get any sleep; I was on the job. Crime waits for no man.”

  He laughed unamusedly. “Found Jennings yet?”

  “Didn’t have to. He found me.”

  Vince had been in the act of raising his cup to his lips; now he stopped and looked at me sharply. “What?”

  I sighed. “When’s your mother due back?”

  “Not for two, three hours at least,” he answered impatiently. “What do you mean, Jennings found you? You saw him?”

  “Saw him, heard him, spoke with him. I would’ve asked to put my fingers in the wounds in his hands and feet and side, but it seemed presumptuous.”

  “And you let him go?” The boy was incredulous, and I didn’t much blame him.

  “I didn’t have a lot of choice, Vince. He had me, as we in the business say, covered. However, if I didn’t get my man, I did get some interesting information out of him.”

  “Yeah? What?” He was not impressed.

  “Maybe I’ll have a cup of that stuff after all,” I said, stalling. The kid made no move to get it for me, so I helped myself while he looked on, irritated, disgusted, impatient. I took a white mug with black and red Scotties on the side, filled it, and gingerly tried the coffee.

  “Well?”

  “Did you make this coffee?”

  He made an exasperated sound. “Yes,” he spat. “Would you like breakfast, too? Come on, what did Jennings say?”

  “He said he didn’t kill your father. Or Christina. And he didn’t know anything had happened to Kate until I told him. This is good coffee; do you grind your own beans?”

  “And you believed him? Are you crazy? What would you expect him to say—that he was guilty?”

  “I wouldn’t expect him to say anything; I wouldn’t expect him to show his face at all. If he was guilty, especially.”

  “If he was …” Words temporarily failed him. With his free hand he raked his fluffy blond hair into the disheveled pompadour he affected. “Jesus Christ,” he finally breathed. “I don’t believe you. You had him right there—you had him—and you let him just …” He shook his head, turned away from me, and gazed out the windows over the sink.

  I said nothing, drank silently, waited.

  Finally Vince spoke, without turning. “Aw, shit,” he sighed. “I guess none of it matters anyway. I suppose it doesn’t make any difference whether they ever catch Jennings. They’d put him in jail for a few years and then he’d be out, and Dad would still be dead. What’s the difference?”

  “Aren’t we forgetting someone?”

  He turned. “Kate?” he said sadly. “If she isn’t dead already, she’s as good as.”

  “That’s a hell of an attitude,” I said in sudden anger.

  “Well, forgive me for being pessimistic.” His voice was acid, his demeanor that of the other morning, when I first met him. “I guess I’m not as broad-minded as you, letting a killer go because he told you he didn’t do it.” Vince’s face turned its splotchy red. Hot coffee spilled on his hand and wrist as his muscles quivered involuntarily in anger and frustration; he ignored it.

  “Look—”

  “Well, maybe it’s better this way,” he growled venomously. “I’d rather see her dead than—”

  “Than what?” I found I was holding my breath.

  He glared at me, turned, dumped his coffee into the sink, and wiped his hand violently on a checked dishtowel.

  “What, Vince?”

  He whirled as if he meant to t
hrottle me; I may have drawn back instinctively, I don’t know. Vince wadded the towel and threw it into the sink. “You know,” he said angrily. “You’ve thought it, I’ve thought it—everyone has. That if Jennings didn’t kidnap Kate, then she must’ve wanted to go with him. And that means she either didn’t care what he’d done … or she helped him.”

  I talked, said the mindless, meaningless sorts of things the situation called for. Vince wasn’t interested. He pulled the dishtowel from the sink and carefully folded it, smoothing it flat on the plastic countertop. “God, I wish she’d’ve listened to me,” Vince said, but not to me, not to anybody. The heat was gone and his voice was hurtful, sorrowful. “I told her that sleeping with that son of a bitch was only making things worse, that sooner or later something bad was going to happen, real bad. But she only laughed.” He seemed to recall that I existed, and cast me a glance over his right shoulder. “Dad too. I told you: He never listened. Never. I warned him, but he wouldn’t take me seriously. He never worried about Jennings, but I knew something was going to happen, especially after Kate started seeing him. The tension around here … And the hell of it is, Kate didn’t love Jennings, not really. I know she didn’t. She couldn’t have, not a pig like that.”

  “Then why’d she spend time with him?”

  He closed his eyes. “Like I said before, I don’t know. Maybe because he was different from the kind of guys she usually dated. You know. He was older, kind of rough, rough-edged. Maybe a girl would find that kind of guy exciting. I can understand that. But not that guy. Not Jennings.” He opened his eyes. They shone with unshed tears. “Something was bound to happen. I kept telling them, something was bound to happen. But they never took me seriously. Never. Now he’s dead.” He wiped impatiently at his eyes. “And I meant what I said: I’d rather Kate be dead, too, than have anything to do with Dad’s murder.”

  Neither of us had heard Amy come down the stairs and into the dining room, neither of us knew how long she had been standing there or how much she had heard. One thing was for certain: She had caught her brother’s last few words, and she didn’t care for them. I saw her—sensed her—out of the corner of my eye before I realized who or what she was, and jumped out of my skin and the way as she rocketed past.